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State of Michigan - Section 245

From the funds appropriated in section 236, each public university shall develop, post,
and maintain, on a user-friendly and publicly accessible Internet site, a comprehensive
report categorizing all institutional general fund expenditures made by the university
within a fiscal year.

The report shall include institutional general fund expenditure amounts categorized both
by each academic unit, administrative unit, or external initiative within the university and
by major expenditure category, including faculty and staff salaries and fringe benefits,
facility-related costs, supplies and equipment, contracts, and transfers to and from other university funds.

The report shall also include a list of all employee positions funded partially or wholly through institutional general fund revenue that includes the position title, name, and annual salary or wage amount for each position.

The university shall not provide financial information on its website under this section if doing so would violate a federal or state law, rule, regulation, or guideline that establishes privacy or security standards applicable to that financial information.

All regular tenure track and tenured faculty with full time appointments are expected to spend 75% of their time in instruction, 15% in research activities and 10% in administrative activities. Their teaching load translates to 8-9 credits per semester.

(i) Many of the Michigan public universities do not routinely and systematically survey all their graduation seniors to gather data for a reliable response to this metric. At present there is no common core set of questions and no consistent date for survey administration. Depending on the institution and the timing, response rates may be low and also biased towards students who have been successful in either entering the workforce or a graduate program. While institutions are making an effort to report the data that is available to them, care should be taken interpreting the results.

(ii) The current way of measuring graduation rates does not take into account students that do not start at a university in a traditional sense, meaning a graduating high school senior who begins college after high school and remains at an institution for his/her entire academic career. For many universities, such as UM-Dearborn, transfer students are very important to university enrollment and mission. More than half of our undergraduate students come to us as transfer students from local community colleges and other four-year colleges and universities. This is typical of institutions in our Carnegie Classification. When evaluating our university’s ability to provide value to the undergraduate experience we support Michigan School Data, which includes National Student Clearinghouse Data, to track undergraduate academic success across all post-secondary institutions. This measurement is a more accurate way to track academic success. All Michigan public post-secondary institutions contribute to the Michigan School Data P-20 Data System, and a large number of Michigan private institutions and national public and private institutions participate in National Clearinghouse Data.

(iii) UM-Dearborn obtains post-graduation data from our students for a time period of up to six months after graduation. We survey students two, four and six months after their graduation date, which provides students with several opportunities to report post-graduation status changes. Data is collected from April, August and December graduates. UM-Dearborn has been collecting this data since 2008. In 2014, the latest tabulated report posted online, 93 percent of students achieved their post-graduation goals. Goals included employment, graduate school, entering public service or delaying a career. A link to the report can be found at: www.umd.umich.edu/695960/.

Many of the Michigan public universities do not routinely and systematically survey all their graduating seniors to gather data for a reliable response to this metric. At present there is no common core set of questions and no consistent date for survey administration. Depending on the institution and the timing, response rates may be low and also biased towards students who have been successful in either entering the workforce or a graduate program. While institutions are making an effort to report the data that is available to them, care should be taken in interpreting the results.